Professor Louise Amoore

Louise Amoore is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University. Her research is focused upon the changing nature of contemporary security calculations, with particular interest in the technologies of risk-based, biometric, and data-led border controls. Her most recent work has examined the implications of derivative forms of data for security, ethics and democracy.

Louise’s new book, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability was published in 2013 by Duke University Press. The book maps out the politics of possibility that has come to characterise contemporary life, tracing its genesis into the diverse worlds of risk consulting, computer science, commercial logistics, and data mining and visualisation.

Project Summary

Louise’s Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellowship is entitled Securing Against Future Events (SAFE); Pre-emption, Protocols and Publics and explores how inferred futures become the basis for new forms of security risk calculus.

In the decade following the events of September 11 2001, security against potential terrorist attack has significantly changed in its form and emphasis. In many of the post-event analyses, the security problem is understood to be how to take action on the basis of uncertain, unforeseen and unanticipated events.

The project will advance knowledge and understanding of these futures-oriented and pre-emptive security and is organised around three thematic streams:

inferred futures, or how future threats can be inferred in advance;

enacting decision, or how action can be taken even where information is partial or fragmentary; and

publics and proportionality, or how judgements can be reached on what is a proportionate pre-emptive security measure.

Within the project, research will focus specifically on the deployment of digital data and analytics within border security programmes.